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CDRI enables member libraries both to create digital resources and to benefit from the digital projects of other libraries. Participating in this round of grants are libraries at Princeton, Vanderbilt, Boston University, Andover Newton, Southern Methodist University, Ohio State, and Southwestern Baptist. They will be digitizing resources as varied as church architecture postcards, woodcuts, missions resources, sermons, and worship services. More details about the schools that participated in Phase One and Two and the resources already available in the CDRI database can be found at http://www.atla.com/cdri/^{Image Removed} .

(Some information adapted from the ATLA CDRI website at http://www.atla.com/cdri/.)

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By Kathleen Brennan, C'04
Acorn contributing writerunmigrated-wiki-markup

\[The following article first appeared in _The Acorn_, "The Student-Run Newspaper of Drew University," Vol. LXXVI, No. 16, February 13, 2004, and is reprinted here, courtesy of the _Acorn_ editor.\]

This past Friday, the Korn Gallery and the University Library inaugurated a retrospective of artist Jacob Landau that will offer the Drew community an opportunity to take in Landau's distinctive lifework until March 5.

Curated by Library Director Andrew Scrimgeour and Landau's friend and representative, Rosa Giletti, in collaboration with Art Professor Raymond Saa Stein, the exhibition is culled from Landau's decades as a renowned illustrator, printmaker and painter, as well as Drew's recently acquired special collection of Landau's archives.unmigrated-wiki-markup

Scrimgeour also drew from his personal relationship with Landau and the show opening's gallery speaker, Dr. David Herrstrom, Scrimgeour's "oldest friend." "\[Landau\] asked a number of his friends and colleagues to be trustees of a foundation that would ensure his work would be seen in galleries, museums and universities," Scrimgeour said. The library director was happy to oblige. "It made sense that his archives would come to Drew, as he was a New Jersey artist," and Drew prides itself on its tradition of archiving special collections.

Landau's work on display in the library gallery includes book illustrations for more popular novels like the western, River Ranch, a short Christmas story from Good Housekeeping by Billy Graham's wife, and later collaborations with Herrstrom, a poet and accomplished scholar of William Blake. Scrimgeour noted how Landau's earlier illustrations seem to complement the text rather than "move against" it, as in later works.

Wiki MarkupOne of the One of the "most striking" qualities of Landau's images is "the sense that they pull you in and push you out," exuding a "wonderful centripetal force" that magnetically repels the viewer, Herrstrom said. Those images are composed almost exclusively of Landau's favorite repeated subject, the human form. "You do not find scenery in his work," Scrimgeour said. Landau "celebrates humanity by portraying portraying the body in all stages of life, from the innocence of childhood to the devastations of old age and illness," as in works like "Apokalypsis." Sexuality is also "something that \ [Landau\] delights in, but it's not superficial." Like Herrstrom, Scrimgeour stressed that the body is never trite or generic \ -\- it is a particular body that contains the "particularity of a person," a figure recognized for its worth as human, and into which the viewer can project himself to reflect back on one's own conception of personhood.  

The idea of mystical vision, particularly that of the prophet, recurs constantly in the exhibition and intertwines with Landau's "relationship to texts." While Herrstrom and Scrimgeour cite Landau's use of color and Michaelangelo-like sense of anatomy as significant elements of the pieces, both seemed to note Landau's use of language and, quite literally, The Word as an essential characteristic. Stained glass windows created for the Knesset Israel temple in Philadelphia, represented in the Korn Gallery in lithograph form, include passages from the prophets they portray, such as Isaiah and Malachi. Several other works are inscribed with Hebrew quotations, as well as Landau's own eloquent musings in English.

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On a perpendicular wall hang striking woodcuts of secular American figures like Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and in one of the exhibitions most compelling pieces, "I, John Brown." Like a woodcut of Abraham Lincoln displayed in the library, Mark Twain's image as Samuel Clemens is deeply shaded and accented by "his incubus," as Herrstrom noted.unmigrated-wiki-markup

Landau's "self-identity was as a social critic, and as an artist," Scrimgeour said. "He saw himself in the tradition of the ancient Hebrew prophets, who were \ [also\] social critics ... in the more profound sense of a prophet who speaks for God, speaking truth about what is happening then and there in the culture." As Landau "portrays the prophets" and individualists that populate his luminous drawings, prints, and paintings, "he does the work of a prophet with his pens and ink."

" He had to show his life as he saw it in the most truthful way he knew," Scrimgeour said, reflecting a quote from Landau's Artist's Statement 2001. In works as complex and diverse as "Holocaust," "The Mark of Cain," "The Question," "Modern Prometheus," the exhibition's namesake, "Kingdom of Dreams Suite," and Scrimgeour's own "St. Jude Window Cartoon for a Stained Glass Window," Landau's work strikingly and beautifully reveals the truths he contained.

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